How to Meditate: A Beginner’s Guide to the Beginner’s Mind

Welcome back!

Last week, we kicked off what will be several weeks of articles focusing on meditation; the how’s, why’s, and how-to. This week, I want to give you a perspective from which to stand that will allow you to better understand the meditation experience and to leave you with a simple self-guided meditation that can be done anywhere at any time.

To reiterate from last week, meditation is a practice of placing your attention on an “object” within your mind, on purpose. That object can be a sensation, like what your butt feels like in a chair, or a concise thought, like “stillness” or “soften” for example. Especially when you’re just starting, I think it’s a fine idea to play around with this. See if you can feel your hair grow, or explore what it feels like to have feet, just be sure to choose the object before you begin and stick with it - it’s very easy to want to change the object of focus during meditation because the mind keeps moving.

Beginner’s Mind

So you want to learn how to meditate because you’ve been told that it will help calm you down or help alleviate feelings of depression, or you want to improve your focus to help you perform better in sports or at work. That’s fantastic, and I applaud your intention to make an effort.

What you might notice when you first sit down to meditate is how quickly your mind is moving. I think it’s important to somewhat expect this - I remember many times feeling like I would never be able to meditate because of that feeling of agitation. If you feel that, that’s totally okay. It might help to note that those feelings are only your body's responses to your day/week/month up to this point, like a sort of momentum, and now that you’re sitting down to meditate, you will begin to work with it to allow your body to settle. For many of us, our first time meditating might actually be the first time we feel fully relaxed.

“Meditation is like moving over into the driver’s seat of your day”

This is the perspective shift I was alluding to earlier. It’s your decision to alter the way your body and mind have been working. It’s knowing that our decisions, behaviours, and intentions dictate how our body is functioning, and by deciding to change that, it begins to change. Meditation is about recognizing that although it’s not always obvious, a lot of what is going on inside of us can be worked with. So how might a meditation session begin?

If you’ve read my past articles, you probably know that a potential answer is breath. Breathing is directly related to our body’s feelings of arousal, so it’s a great place to start. As our focus shifts from bothersome and intrusive thoughts to the sensation of slow, deep breathing, our respiration rate slows, and so too does agitation and arousal. Breathing pairs so well with meditation because beyond keeping us alive, it also gives us an object to focus on. And fortunately for us, it has enough “movement” in it that for even the newest of meditators, its ever-changing sensations make it easier to focus on.

Breathing is a fantastic anchor to build our meditative practice around because it is always with us, it directly affects our physiology, and can be done in different ways, depending on what feelings you want to produce.

A Self-guided Meditation Session

Give this section a read and if you’ve got the time, give it a shot right now or save it for a time where you have 2 minutes to yourself.

Sit or lay down somewhere that is comfortable and relatively free of external distractions. Set a 2-minute timer. Close your eyes, and place your attention on what it feels like to breathe. That could look like feeling your stomach or shoulders move underneath your shirt, or the air as it enters and exits your nose, or the air as it travels through your throat. Pick one of these or a different sensation that you feel is relatively pronounced and easy to feel, and stick with it. There are so many sensations to be felt.

As you begin to feel your breath, you’ll notice that your attention is moving from your breathing to other thoughts. You can begin to count in your head, in seconds, your inhales and exhales. 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out. 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5. Like a sort of metronome that helps captivate our cognitive spotlight.

Without placing too much effort, see how many seconds you can count before your attention is muddied and pulled onto something else. Chances are you won’t exactly notice right when you lose your attention, but rather a few seconds (or minutes) after. This is the point where people might feel like they can’t get it. But the very fact that you noticed your attention deviate onto something else is the practice. When you notice, just come back to breathing and counting. You could call that a “meditative rep”, just like the biceps curls we do in the gym.

And when the 2-minute timer dings, take stock of how your body is feeling. Can you notice a difference? Do your thoughts feel as quick as they did before?

A Game of Feeling

Too often do I hear the stories of disheartened folk who have tried to meditate only to find that they “just can’t stop thinking”, “my mind just won’t let me”.

This isn’t the goal of meditation.

That’s not to say that we all don’t face our own difficulties when learning to meditate, but rather that perception of failure is a product of how meditation is generally understood and perceived. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just a translation issue.

You aren’t trying to empty your mind, or not have any thoughts, or have your sense of self disappear; these are all experiences that ironically happen when you are meditating and precisely aren’t trying to do that.

Instead, it’s a game of feeling, where the only goal is to feel a particular feeling as clearly as you can. This requires no effort. For example, feel what it feels like to have a right hand. Would you say you’re straining to feel it? No, it’s more like looking at something. Does it feel effortful to move your gaze from one object to another?

This is the goal. It’s the soft, light placement of attention on an object in consciousness, be it breath, an image, a thought, or sensation.

That’s all for this week. Be on the lookout on my Instagram, over the next month I’ll be doing meditation sessions live (that will be cached in my story highlights if you miss it). I’ll be keeping them very simple, just like this one so if you’re a noobie and want to learn more, you’ll know where to look.

Next week we’ll discuss a bit more of what "an object in consciousness” means, and how a greater understanding of it can invite deeper experiences within your meditation practices.

Until next week, take it easy, but take it!

-Our Blue Sky Minds